Lattifah Harris

A2 MEDIA EVALUATION

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products?

In this shot we have the singer being represented, and ‘sold’ in the music video, we have chosen to do a close up to make sure that we know who the artist is and make it known to the target audience. It also links the artist to the consumer by having her sing directly to the camera creating a strong link between them. This is how our work upkeeps the conventions of a music video in the way that the artist is being sold throughout the video with her not just singing but also acting. Throughout the video we had decided to use our artist in the story as well so that we can get more coverage of her also to give the song a more of a personal feel.

The way that we use the lyrics in the song to uphold visual references to the actual music video also shows that we are following the codes and conventions as a normal music video. This helped us to use the lyrics as a story and we were able to portray a dying romance, for example when the lyrics had said ‘romance is dead’ at the end of the chorus we have the artist drop out from her ‘dream world’. Another part would be the line ‘ I asked you for a letter you emailed, have we failed’ this is were we had decided to add in the note and key to the boyfriend and we see a suitcase to indicate the fact that she was leaving showing that they have ‘failed’ and ‘letter’ links with the note

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products?

Another way would be the code of dress, we felt that the song had a 1950’s feel to it which influenced us to dress our character in that era of clothing. We kept this as a underlining theme as in our album cover we kept the idea of 1950’s by having copying the images of Anne Taintor and recreated them using out artist as the woman in all of the pictures. We had done this so that you can see the obvious change between modern day women and women from the 1950’s and we had liked the way Taintor had been able to show this through her work whilst keeping a fun element. We felt as if we had to keep it lighthearted as looking at the artist she has a fun personality that doesn’t only come about in her songs but also in the way she dresses and performs.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products?

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products? (cont.)

Looking at the narrative theory, this is when there is a continuous story shown throughout a piece of media. (Has a beginning and the end).The way we have shown this is by showing the story of a young couple who are slowly growing apart, we had chosen this story line as the main lyric of the song is ‘romance is dead’ throughout the rest of the song we hear about the males failed attempts at showing his affection towards her. ‘I ask you for a letter so you emailed, have we failed?’ we showed her note next to her suitcase showing that she was leaving. It has an obvious ending to the song where we finally see what was driving a wedge between them and it was that she was in fact pregnant.

The 4 main narrative theorists where Propp , Barthes, Todorov and Levi-Straus

Moving onto Propp’s theory, where he had stated that throughout the narrative there are 8 distinctive characters:- 1. The Hero2. The Villain3. The Princess4. Her Father5. The Donor6. The Dispatcher7. The False Hero8. The HelperOnce those characters are established by the audience there is an automatic assumption which the viewer believes the character will do. In our video we put these characters like:-9. The Hero:- Vintage/Fantasy Male10. The Villain:- Modern/Real Male11. The Princess:- Female Protagonist12. Her Father:- Modern/ Real Male13. The Donor:- Female Protagonist14. The Dispatcher:- Modern/Real Male15. The False Hero:- Vintage/Fantasy Male16. The Helper:- Female ProtagonistAs there are only two characters we get a mix of Propp’s characters in them. For example the Vintage/Fantasy Male is the hero as he saves the Female from her everyday life and ‘rubbish’ boyfriend, but then he is The False Hero as he might save her for the moment but not forever as he isn’t real.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products? (cont.)

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products? (cont.)

Looking at Todrov’s take on the narrative theory we see that he believes there is pattern in a story that starts with the equilibrium to disequilibrium back to the equilibrium, this pattern could reverse and be seen as disequilibrium to equilibrium back to disequilibrium. The way we have upheld Todrov’s theory is by setting our storyline in this same pattern. At the beginning we start with the disequilibrium by the couple not talking to each other we then move onto the equilibrium where she has her fantasy’s and everything seems to be fine until we reach the ending where they are once again arguing and we find out she is pregnant which they aren’t very happy about, this brought us back to our disequilibrium .

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and convenventions of real media products?

Levi- Strauss’ theory is on binary opposites was used in our video and our ancillary texts as we had the complete opposite of a 1950’s housewife to a modern day woman. This was one of our main themes and we had decided to make it complete opposites so that the difference was clear when she was in a ‘fantasy’ . Other opposites we had used would be the male character when he was in the fantasy he was loving and attentive but when he was shown in the ‘real world’ he was the complete opposite showing he was unloving and dismissive. In our ancillary texts we had showed the binary opposites by using images by Anne Taitoner completely reversing them so that it fits with modern day values.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

To keep the theme of the 1950’s that we had originally found for the music video we had decided to use images from Anne Taintor’s work. Instead of just using her existing images we have decided to re create these pictures using out artist so that it can link back to the music video itself where we see the artist in both 1950’s and modern day clothing, we tried to recreate this same look on out advertisement and album case.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

• We had handed out an questionnaire to a group of young people around the age of 16. We had asked them questions such like, ‘Was it clear whether or not it was reality or a dream?’ the majority had said that it was clear, this showed our main theme had been portrayed correctly, there where other questions also for example ‘Was the lighting affective’ we had found that some had commented that the lighting was poor at some times, this made us go back to our video and look at parts in which we could make brighter using the editing program, making it as bright as possible without damaging the clip itself.

• We have also put our music video on YouTube and Facebook, we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from this but we find it is not as useful as the questionnaires as people mainly stick to one word comments such as ‘good’ or great job’ this doesn't help us find out what works and what doesn’t in our work so we had received most of our feedback from questionnaires.

• Before we had shot our video we had made a questionnaire to find out our target audience we decided it would be young people starting from about 14 to around 20. We realize this is a large target market but we feel as if our artist relates to those around her own age and below. We had also asked things like the style of music this age group listens to. This helped us confirm that Paloma Faith was the right artist to use as some of the people said that they listen to soul. Most had said R’n’B as the main music that they listen to but we feel that soul and R’n’B is a very close genre and most people that listen to should usually listen to R’n’B also.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Was the Genre Rep-resented

YesNoOther

Music Genres

RnBSoulRock and PopOther

This is some of the results from the quantative answers that we had gathered.

We have also have had more written evidence where we had asked the focus group what they had thought about the lighting of out music video. We had found that they wrote things like ‘ it was good but slightly dim in places’ and ‘too dark to see certain features’ when we had seen this we went over our music video and tried to brighten up the scenes as much as possible using IMovie without destroying the colouring of the scene.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use internet searching was a very good help, it did not only help us find our artist but gave us a insight into what our artist is like and helped us to make links to things that we might have not realised for example Paloma Faith’s style matching the artwork of Anne Taintor. It was also helpful whilst designing our ancillary texts as it gave us a chance to look at other CD covers and advertisements from not just Paloma Faith but others in the same genre and others. We had also used it to record our progress on our work by setting up a blog which helped us keep in track with each other.

This medium made it very easy for us to research other professional and Student music video’s by being able to look at these videos made us know what it is that was expected from us and what we can do so that our video can stand out and reach closer to the expectations of an professional music video. This was also helpful when we had first started and had to find a song to use. YouTube made it easy to find different songs from artist we already knew but songs that we did not or had not have a video made for.

This is the camera we had used to create the images for our storyboard. We used the same camera to film our video also which was helpful as we didn’t have to use different equipment for the same thing which was going to recorded.

Web 2.0 is the term given to describe a second generation of the world wide web  that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information online. This includes things like blogs, forums and other internet websites.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For our filming we had used the Sony DCRSR37ES.CEH. We feel that the camera may have only been small but the picture in which it creates is very good as it has HDD capability which makes the picture recorded clear. We had used this camera for our AS project also which is why we had found this easy to use and there wasn’t much trouble when using the camera. The battery life on this camera was very worrying as it felt like we had to work very quickly so that we could get as much shots done before the camera had run out of charge. Although the camera can be used whilst charging this would have been difficult as we need to move about a lot and there wasn’t always plugs in each location. If we did this again I would prefer to use a camera with better battery life so we do not feel as rushed. Last year the Touch screen capability did not work on our camera but this year it had been fixed and was working again this was very helpful as it meant we did not have to wait until the camera was connected to a computer to watch back out shots. Using a tripod with this camera is also tricky as the camera is very small and the tripod much larger it was hard to manoeuvre easily with it as the space in which we was using was quite small.

We had used this camera to take the pictures for our ancillary task. We had decided to use this as the pictures are very important part of out task and we needed a camera with good megapixels so that the image is clear and precise. The camera was very easy to use as the settings are easy to access and it was very simple to take the actual picture. No tripod was used as it would be better to use in hand was you can achieve better shots.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

To edit our music video we had used the IMovie software on Apple Mac’s. We had already used this software in AS so we knew the basic things to do like adding clips and making them flow into each other easily without transitions. The range of transitions on the IMovie software is very limited and we found it didn’t really relate to our piece so we had only used the transitions once in our video as it wasn’t needed. The lip syncing parts of the video was very challenging as if it is a little bit out of time it is very noticeable we had tried our hardest to make it sync together perfectly.

For evaluation we used power point we had found this very easy to use as we have been using it a lot throughout our time at school in various other situations. It gave use an opportunity to use a skill in which we have by using a system we know very well, for example using different slide designs and text boxes and images on our slides rather than one long essay we were able to break it up in different parts. By adding images and using different colours and fonts made our work a lot more personal.

We had used this software to edit the images into a CD cover and poster for our ancillary task. We found it quite challenging at first but once we used it more and more we started to use things that sped up the process and learnt shortcuts for example using the wand tool instead of a magnetic loop tool to select certain parts of images.